Update, November 2014: These days, I’m hosting my own vanilla minecraft server on Linode, using MCMyAdmin for a web interface. I finally did it. I broke down and rented a Minecraft server. Previously, I had hosted a Minecraft server pretty successfully on my personal web server. The problem became two-fold: it was a huge time-sink, as updating all the plugins that I was running took a long time at each release....

This is a great article by a guy over at Github about slide design. He makes some really good points, and his slides really are beautiful. I want to see more presentations with these design pointers in mind.

More on SOPA and Protect-IP (Don’t break the internet!) As I said in my previous post, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP are both very bad pieces of legislation. They are not only technically damning for the internet, but they are unconstitutional. When I started doing my due diligence the other day with regards to these bills, I didn’t know much about them. After some research, though, I have discovered just how bad these bills are....

I’ve heard a lot of chatter about SOPA (the Stop Online Privacy Act), which is currently going through congress. However, today I finally decided to look into it. And I definitely didn’t like what I found. Here’s a video summing up the problems (the video is for the Protect IP act, which was introduced earlier this year, but most of the same problems apply to both bills). (Found via Matt Cutt’s Blog...

My iPhone 4S came this last week. Previously, I was a proud owner of the HTC Evo 4G, a great phone. But still I switched. Since I’ve had a few people ask me why, I decided I’d better just blog it. Sorry for my rambling. Both platforms have their advantages. I suppose I’ll go platform by platform and examine some pros and cons: iOS With iOS 5, an iPhone was finally a valid alternative to my Android phone....

My good friend Chad recently started learning about Python. After getting a fair bit into a book on the subject, he posted on Google+: Language seems cool, though I haven’t found a compelling reason to need it. I think Django is the main reason I want to use it. Calling upon the powers of +Julio Carlos Menendez and +Colton Myers to give me some examples where using Python is WAY better than another language....

I use vim. Vim is a 20-year-old text editor, based on the 35-year-old “vi” editor (pronounced vee-eye, not vie). vi and emacs are both part of an editor holy war that has been going on for decades. I discovered this holy war years ago, mentioned on some website or another, and started to research. I tried both editors briefly, and then decided to take vim’s side of the holy war. At the time, this pick was kind of arbitrary – I really didn’t know enough about the two editors to make a truly educated decision....

I recently found a “poem” about the philosophies of Python. It pretty well embodies the reasons behind my recently acquired love of Python: The Zen Of Python Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity....

Here we go again. I mean, seriously. You’ve gotta be wondering, “Why does he even keep trying?” This has to be my 6th or 7th attempt at a blog. Shouldn’t I just give up already? Well this time I’m trying something a little bit different. I’m going to blog about technology, rather than my personal life. Obviously I’ll try to throw some personal life stuff in there, but the problem is, I don’t feel like my life is interesting to write about, and thus I have a hard time staying interested in the writing, and I assume others have a hard time staying interested in the reading....

Like I mentioned in the last post, I’m taking a little bit of a different approach with this blog. Rather than try to blog about my life, which, in my opinion, leads to rapid loss of interest both on my part and the part of my readers, I’ve decided to focus on something that I’m actually interested in (and I hope interests a few of you): technology. Specifically, computers. I got pulled in at a pretty young age....